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Comment by FlowingRiver | Hacker News Reader

I do wonder if Huawei will eventually just pivot to their own ISA so they can cut even more royalties?

5 years ago I wouldn't have considered it but after Huawei build a total swap over OS via Harmony OS and the likes of Loongson pushing their Loongarch ISA, it doesn't seem so unlikely anymore.

China's domestic CPU tech is getting pretty interesting, their GPU's are still a long way behind however. The Lisuan 7G100 looks to be the best so far and it is fine but it is still years behind Nvidia/AMD/Intel.

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RISC-V is the ISA. They don't need to invent another one. They had Longsoon before. It's all just MIPS in disguise.

Half of the GPU game is software. I'm not saying that it doesn't or can't exist but I have yet to see what good Chinese software looks like.

Probably, I see a lot of RISC-V chips coming out of China and they are fine for what they are. Progress is pretty good nowadays but they have a while to go.

As for the software, this is why I mentioned Lisuan and not Moore Threads. Lisuan's drivers are mediocre but they work. Moore Threads software is a total disaster to the point were the cards tend to perform WAY below what, on paper, their cards should be able to do.

It is an uphill battle when it comes to software because without that, your hardware is useless. Just ask Intel with their iAPX and Itanium processors. Intel couldn't overcome the software mote despite being THE processor manufacturers at those times.

Perhaps outdated but when I was hunting a Loongson laptop (just recently deprecated by OpenBSD) I got the vibe most Chinese nationals wanted x86 and pirated Windows to use software like anyone else.

That sadly matches the conclusion I reached after years of following that processor arch online. It just doesn't seem anyone is willing to do the hard work of maintaining something different. Other than Apple and that has its own issues...

Every Chinese company dreams of becoming Apple, yet none does the hard work, or knows what to begin with.

Even current apple is not the apple that gained the big initial momentum that got it where it is. No revolutionary products or services for decade+, just milking user base and heavily investing into marketing around supposed privacy. You can take ie their phone and compare it with 5 year old model and struggle to find differences (which is valid for most but not all manufacturers at this point).

Market is simply too mature and saturated and moving phones into foldable phablets/tablets is an evolution at best. Also it started and was perfected elsewhere so nothing novel or shocking and 0 WOW factor.

Pretty much. It is an uphill battle for them in terms of mind share. It doesn't help that their top end chips are still a few years behind most new x86 chips on general work loads, and they are WAY behind on more specific things like encryption/decryption stuff due to lack of dedicated ASIC's for them.

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